Sunday, March 16, 2008

Okay, so everyone's looking forward to Dawkins' appearance at UT this coming Wednesday. That will be at 7:00 PM. I suspect it will go about two hours, including Q&A. So I thought that following the talk, unless you're all going to be a bunch of pathetic gotta-go-to-work-tomorrow candy-asses, we'd have an Atheist Experience Blog meetup somewhere in the vicinity. I'm announcing this early so that people will have a couple of days to think about it and add it to their schedules accordingly. There are any number of kewl coffeehouses or bars or late night restaurants to repair to in the UT area, up and down the Drag and elsewhere. Hell, even Amy's Ice Creams is an option. So, all you locals chime in, and if you're interested, offer your suggestions.

9 comments:

I wish I could go to ask some harder questions that you all may give him. It is a crying shame how evolution has even destroyed modern medicine. Most evolution scientist, even this Dawkins dude, still believe the old story that the appendix is some kind of useless leftover from our ape-like ancestry. It's incredible that this myth continues to be spread. Even the encyclopedia sates "The appendix doesn't serve any useful purpose as a digestive organ in humans, and it is believed to be gradually disappearing in the human species over evolutionary time."(1)

Newest medical textbook, on the other hand, present the known function of this organ. For example, the appendix has a role to play in our immune system. Many evolutionists continue to cling to outdated and wrong information in their attempt to persuade you that evolution is true. They also claim that there are other so called "useless" body parts that are "left over"

There are so many examples of how evolution-thinking , such as your god Dawkins, has actually been detrimental to medical science. Sad, have fun being deceived all.

Who was it that discovered the function of the appendix? That's right, scientists. Not creationists.

And yet, the appendix is still a vestigial organ, and additional study will doubtless go on to determine what is specific role is, or once was, in the human body. Indeed, the role of the appendix as something to "reboot" the digestive system, makes good evolutionary sense to biochemists. The idea that it's somehow "damaging" to the field of medicine that an organ has been found to have a function where it was formerly thought to have none is the kind of thing -- well, that you'd expect to hear from an uneducated creotard like Dan Marvin.

But the fact that the organ can still become deadly when inflamed, making its removal advisable, and the fact that children who have them removed suffer no ill effects as they grow up, supports the idea that the organ is still vestigial, and hardly argues well for its being the product of an "intelligent designer." After all, an "intelligent designer" ought to have been able to prevent appendicitis from being an issue.

As Theobald notes over at TO: "However, contrary to what one is apt to read in anti-evolutionary literature, there is currently no evidence demonstrating that the appendix, as a separate organ, has a specific immune function in humans (Judge and Lichtenstein 2001; Dasso et al. 2000; Williams and Myers 1994, pp. 5, 26-29). To date, all experimental studies of the function of an appendix (other than routine human appendectomies) have been exclusively in rabbits and, to a lesser extent, rodents. Currently it is unclear whether the lymphoid tissue in the human appendix performs any specialized function apart from the much larger amount of lymphatic tissue already distributed throughout the gut. Most importantly with regard to vestigiality, there is no evidence from any mammal suggesting that the hominoid vermiform appendix performs functions above and beyond those of the lymphoid-rich caeca of other primates and mammals that lack distinct appendixes."

Ol Dan, like most uneducated creotards, doesn't seem to get that in science, new evidence leads to people changing their minds. Because, duh George, that's how science works. Dan, being uneducated and stupid, thinks of science as another religion, where inviolable dogmas are handed down and never to be questioned. This is how he's able to say stupid, uneducated things like "There are so many examples of how evolution-thinking , such as your god Dawkins, has actually been detrimental to medical science." You see, because he's uneducated and stupid. Indeed, we wouldn't have such things as antibiotics, or indeed, most of the medicines that people take for virtually everything without a solid understanding of evolutionary biology. Without understanding how organisms adapt, how do you expect to be able to adapt treatments once one type of infectious agent is no longer killed by the medicines you've previously been using? If you don't know evolution, you can't do medicine much at all, really. Unless you want to go back to Christian medicine. Well, no leeches for me, thanks.

Okay so, Tard-Boy pwnage out of the way, let's get back to the original intent of this thread: Where do people want to meet after the talk? Further threadjacking from Tard-Boy will be dealt with.

Okay, well, I wanted to encourage other local readers to offer suggestions of places, too. But my ideas would be:

--Spider House--Amy's on Guadalupe--La Tazza Fresca (another nice late night coffeehouse on Guad., across the street and about half a block further up from Amy's)--Dog and Duck, where ACA'ers are used to meeting for happy hours already

Mainly it all depends on what people are in the mood for: food, coffee, soft drinks, desserts, booze, a quiet place to talk or something a little more boisterous?

I'm on Spring Break, and even though I will be coming down from Killeen, I wouldn't mind meeting some of the ACA. I'll definitely check back here to see if it will happen. Does anybody know if he'll be signing any books? (After all, what is the sense of a holy book if it is not signed by our "god" ;-p -hope I got that emoticon correct).

Well, in the downtown area where Book People is, there's plenty of stuff to do to kill time. The weather's supposed to be all right, so you could go to Barton Springs or Zilker Park. Or you could just fart around downtown all day. Go see a movie at the Alamo on 6th St. or at Dobie by campus. And there are roughly six billion and three places to eat and drink Shiner. Not a bad day off, really.

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PLEASE NOTE: The Atheist Experience has moved to a new location, and this blog is now closed to comments. To participate in future discussions, please visit http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/axp.The Atheist Experience is a weekly live call-in television show sponsored by the Atheist Community of Austin. This independently-run blog (not sponsored by the ACA) features contributions from current and former hosts and co-hosts of the show.